How To Change Your IP Address

NOTE: The program I discuss and use in this post is called ExpressVPN. You can learn more about this software here.

There are a ton of reasons to want to learn how to change your IP address. Perhaps If you live in a geographic area with internet censorship or maybe you really want to access websites and online content that is restricted to certain geographic IPs only.

Personally, I grew up in the US but moved to Europe in the fall of 2011. I loved everything about living in europe but I did miss my US IP address quite a bit. With a US IP Adress I could access website like Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and other web sites. With my European IP address, I saw a lot of error messages that read “this content is not available in your geographic area.”

I knew I’d need to learn how to change my IP address in order to access some of the American sites I could no longer access. So I began a massive search to find a tool, service, or software that would help me accomplish just that. This proved to be a lot more challenging than I expected. There also isn’t a lot of helpful information online about “How To Change your IP Address” which is partly my motivation for writing this post.

After a ton of research I came to the conclusion that I was in need of a Virtual Private Network or VPN to help me change my european IP address to an American IP address. Fortunately for me, you need almost no tech knowledge whatsoever to connect download, install, and use a VPN. In fact, I’ll show you how I did it right now.

I tried a couple VPN software companies before deciding on ExpressVPN. In my opinion, ExpressVPN is by far the best VPN software online for many reasons. They are a trusted brand with excellent customer support, their software is quick and super easy to use, and they have thousands of different IPs spread across many VPN servers, located in multiple countries giving you the best connections imaginable! I honestly swear by this company!

The software works on Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. There’s even support for android and iOS devices which lets you take the VPN mobile.

Once you’ve installed ExpressVPN it will look at little something like this:

This is what ExpressVPN looks like on a windows operating system.

All you have to do is enter your username and password and select the geographic location / server you’d like to connect to. For example. I live in Budapest, Hungary and I want to change my IP address to Chicago. I simply Select Chicago, Illinois from the list of locations I’d like to connect through.

The coolest part is that now that I’m connected to ExpressVPN, all of the applications that access the internet on my computer will connect to the internet through the VPN. This means that I can literally surf the web as if I’m based in the USA. Netflix will now work, Hulu videos will stream normally, and I can listen to all the music I want on Pandora! It’s actually really awesome.

This post is getting pretty long so I’ll wrap it up with this: I never really expected that I’d be using a VPN. Two years ago I really had no idea what a VPN was or how to use it. Currently I’m using ExpressVPN every single day and I absolutely love it. Try it out for yourself to see what I’m talking about.

If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them in the comments below.